THE FACTOR ANALYTIC STUDY ON LISTNERS' ATTITUDES TOWARD STUTTERING CHILDREN

Abstract

To clarify the structure of listners' attitudes towards stuttering children, the author had four rating groups (total 259 raters) rate the stuttering children and the non-stuttering children by means of semantic differential method. Factor analysis was applied to the rating results toward stuttering children by all rating groups, and ten factors were extracted as a result. These ten factors were interpreted as the factors of (1) nervous unsociableness, (2) sincere life attitudes, (3) modesty, (4) inconsistency, (5) scrupulosity, (6) dependency, (7) lack of flexibility, (8) poorness of scholastic attainments, (9) lack of creativity, and (10) adherence. Considering the higher percentage of the relative variance, nervous unsociableness and sincere life attitudes were observed as the most important factors among these. Then, these ten factors were corresponded to the relative rating results toward the stuttering children and the non-stuttering children obtained on each SD item. The result indicated that the stuttering children were much more positively rated than the non-stuttering ones by listners in the respect of three factors, such as sincere life attitudes, modesty, and scrupulosity. The problems to be left for future research are as follows: 1. As the present report deals only with the results of all rating groups, difference among four rating groups have to be examined. 2. In previous studies regarding listners' attitudes toward stuttering children, the procedure was to inquire into listners' images of a word, "stuttering" or "stuttering children" by means of semantic differential method. Therefore, the author intends to investigate, in future, how their images would be changed when listners encounter the real situation in which children are stuttering.